Old-school crooks managed to steal documents related to secret plans to build a joint French-British drone aircraft after snatching a briefcase at a Paris railway station.
The briefcase was stolen from an executive at French defence contractor Dassault Aviation while he and a colleague were in the process of purchasing a …

Re: time and time again

I had this discussion with a colleague around BYOD. I use a tablet that is encrypted and password protected and the software I use further password protects its contents. I can also wipe it remotely should it ever go walkabout. This is not acceptable storage for corporate information.

However, I am allowed to bring my own notepad and pen and am not required to write in code nor shred my information before taking it off the premesis. The only security my written word is that my handwriting is crap.

Provided you do it properly, electronic data storage and transfer can have its benefits.

Cue the moral outrage

Re: Cue the moral outrage

As has already been said above, yes, paper documents are unencrypted and therefore insecure. The difference between this breach and a loss of an unencrypted USB stick is one of scale.

An cheap USB drive can hold 2Gb of data which can be a hell of a lot of database records or confidential documents. A quick google brings up a number which I'll just assume is correct because it looks nice. 500Mb gets you 10,000 pages of document. 2Gb obviously allows you to lose 40,000 pages of confidential data. 1x briefcase of paper allows you to lose maybe a few hundred.

Is it bad? Yes. Is it as bad as it could have been with a USB drive? No.

Nitpick

That'd be MB (Byte, not bit), and is ballpark for plain text. Think 80x66 for letter, A4 should be a line or two less, default monospace font, and so on, and so forth. That's also without margins; 65 characters is more readable, add a bit of room at top and bottom, and you end up with 4kB-or-so per plain-text page. Text also tends to compress really well. "Modern document formats", OTOH, tend to explode the size to some large multiple of that, think orders of magnitude larger. And then there's bitmap pictures. Blueprints I'd expect to be in some vector format, and that shouldn't be too big or at least compress reasonably well.

Depending on the briefcase, you could possibly fit two reams of 80g/m^2 paper in, or about a thousand pages. Print both sides, print half size so two pages fit on a side, use thinner paper (60g/m^2 still goes through normal printers), press a bit harder, and you get what, maybe 5000-odd pages of document in a sturdy briefcase.

Flash sticks are still worse, of course, but then again, the big problem with information is that monetising it is possibly the hardest part. Mere volume by itself, though, tells you next to nothing.

You can have databases and databases full of data (hello government and big corporates), and it might turn out to be absolutely worthless, except in the cases where the ICO fines you for losing it, when it turns out it's nothing but a liability, perhaps to the people in the database if not directly to you. You can have a couple sentences and people end up willing to pay millions for it. It all depends.

What an idiot

The man should resign or have any defence contracts taken away because he has little concept of security. Whether there were important secrets in his case or just a sandwich, the point is he can't be trusted to keep things safe. In his line of work you'd think that would be one of the key requirements.

Never, ever put a bag or case down in a public place and turn your back on it, even for a second. Assume everyone wants to steal your belongings.

Hustle, Leverage, any other program me featuring conartists?

Isn't this just a standard distract-and-grab technique shown used by any conartist? This really does play out of any TV programme.

This article does however lack some detail; what was actually taken? 'Blueprints' for a next generation drone are unlikely to fit in a briefcase; or for that matter a suitcase! Was it actually a thumb drive that was stolen? Was it possibly encrypted? Is it likely that anything has really been lost or exposed at all?

I realise we may never know the answer to these questions and still think the guy is a fool for making such a rooky mistake but maybe, just maybe, this is really a non-story.